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For our IBD project, we’re working with Cambodia’s first and only rum distillery, Samai, based in Phnom Penh. Our team is partnering with Samai’s founders, Antonio and Daniel, on expansion strategy, new market pricing, operational improvement and accounting guidance.

Prior to arriving in Phnom Penh we had been corresponding with Samai to finalize the scope of the project and complete as much pre-work as possible. While our team was productive across those six weeks, it was remarkable how much more effective we became on location with the client. For instance, we had an idea of what the rum production process looked like, however being able to visualize the steps enhanced our understanding to the level required to make recommendations. Additionally, speaking face to face with Daniel, Antonio and Champich, the master distiller, we were able to have more insightful conversations and gain a better feel for the business and its needs.

Dan and Sushant review the production steps with Daniel in order to calculate COGS

Another byproduct of live meetings is shifting priorities. While the project work streams had been determined in advance of our arrival, it became clear our first-day additional challenges that require support will surface. Our team recognized the importance of prioritization as a guiding principle – we need to invest our time and resources into the projects that are most vital to Samai and also ensure our deliverables are actionable.

Cocktail Competition

Samai’s distillery is open to the public on Thursday nights, when it serves up Samai rum-based cocktails to a lively, mostly expat, clientele. During our required rum tasting our first day on the job I suggested – somewhat jokingly – that we have a competition on Thursday to determine which Haas team member can create the best cocktail. Antonio sounded intrigued and within a day we had teams decided, menus set, ingredients purchased and a professional flyer posted on social media. That escalated quickly!

Dan and I settled on a variation of a Dark and Stormy entitled Ann’s Arbor, an homage to our undergraduate institution. Leveraging Joe’s advanced rum knowledge, he and Sushant crafted a more complex, boozy concoction, a Queens Park Swizzle.

We met at the distillery early to pour practice drinks and tweak the recipes until we had it right. This was not just a fun experiment; patrons would be paying for these cocktails! Once we had the proportions, preparations, and presentations down, it was game time.

It could have been the Berkeley-Haas name on the flyer, perhaps it was the sophisticated drink selection or maybe it was our rugged good looks and charm behind the back bar, but the orders flowed in like Trump tweets after a New York Times bombshell report.

Bill and Joe try to keep up with demand behind the bar

At a few points we couldn’t keep up with the demand – we were forced to act like seasoned bartenders who knew how to accommodate a packed bar.

For the competition piece, believe it or not, according to the official tally the contest ended in a tie! The Ann’s Arbor team will point out that our drink had a higher volume of orders, which should be the tie breaker. The Queen Park Swizzle duo will remind us that more orders led to more misinformed votes from those who only sampled one beverage.

Regardless of who deserves the crown, overall the cocktail competition was a win. We learned useful skills that aren’t often taught in the classroom, had fun, brought in incremental sales for Samai and met some interesting people.

After shaking and stirring as celebrity bartenders for the night, it was back to our real lives Excel modeling and PowerPoint-ing as consultants at the Samai office the next morning. It was fun while it lasted, but there’s still work to do!

The Berkeley Haas IBD team finally arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe on Sunday, July 2 after over 30 hours of travel time. After a quick shower break, we were taken to the ACT headquarters where we met the 24 brilliant students who we will be teaching over the next two weeks.

ACT is a non-profit entrepreneurship development program that aims to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Zimbabwe. It was launched in 2014 and has developed in collaboration with several prior Haas IBD teams. This year’s ACT classroom training has expanded to 3-weeks in length. In the 1st week, students learn the fundamentals of design thinking, identify opportunities in the market, and form teams to address the issues identified. In the 2nd week, students take a break from their own projects to participate in the inaugural corporate hackathon with ACT’s partner, Innscor, a parent company that owns well-known Zimbabwean consumer staples and durable products brands. Students will have the unique opportunity to present their innovative recommendations to Innscor executives. In the 3rd week, students will refocus on the own projects and learn core business skills such as marketing, leadership, strategy, and finance. They will make a final pitch of their project to the ACT Executive Team and local investors. Once students complete the training, they will be eligible for mentorship through ACT and potential seed funding for their own business ideas.

In addition to the Berkeley IBD team, which consists of team lead Praveen Settipalli (EWMBA Class of 2016) and (EWMBA Class of 2018) Sampada Chavan, Sen Raveendranathan, Kate Linarducci, and Yi Zhang, this year’s ACT teaching team also includes London Business School MBA student Zac Orlando, and former Haas FTMBA IBD students Dan Fishman and Sebastian Amenabar, who are primarily responsible for teaching the third week of classes when the EWMBA IBD team heads back to California.

The IBD team prepared diligently for 7 weeks prior to arriving in Harare, refining the curriculum, creating lesson plans and teaching materials, building out the corporate hackathon, and recommending a strategy for ACT to expand.

On Day 1, we introduced the students to design thinking by redesigning a wallet with the customer in mind. First, students shared and explained the contents of their wallet. Next, each student team converged on a particular item of interest and dug deeper into why and how to design for that item. The teams created prototypes, gathered feedback from the end user and refined their product. The final product was far different than the wallet that they started with. One team found that many people carried receipts in their wallet in order to budget and reconcile their daily spending. Instead of creating a new wallet better suited for carrying receipts, their proposed solution to eliminate receipts with a budgeting tool instead.

We also challenged students to be creative with limited resources. With only $2 of seed capital and 2 hours, students were asked to go out in the field to create value. Judges awarded the ingenuity of the winning team, who spoke to customers at a high-end supermarket to identify an opportunity to charge for smart shopping services to busy shoppers. They did not even use the $2 they were given. Taph Machirori, 30, reflected, “the $2 challenge taught me not to limit myself. I don’t need to be confined with the resources I think I have. Think outside of the box.”

On Day 2, each student had one minute to present a need they see in the market today – these ranged from inefficiencies in the patient experience at hospitals and pharmacies to the lack of recycling in Zimbabwe. Students then voted on the presentation topics that interested them and teams were formed based on their voting preferences and leadership styles.

For the rest of the week, students learned design thinking through a combination of lectures and hands on experience working on their team project. The IBD team taught the students to diverge and converge as they framed and reframed the problem, tested their assumptions, brainstormed and narrowed down their ideas, and created their prototype.

Student teams went out into the field during each step of the process to observe and conduct interviews to validate their assumptions, redefine their “how might we” statement, present their proposal, and receive feedback on their prototype. The Haas IBD instructors shadowed and mentored student teams throughout the week. Since the design thinking process is not a linear, often times teams were met with unexpected insights that led them to reconsider and pivot in a different direction.

Knowing when to pivot is an important lesson in design thinking and students experienced this first hand with the marshmallow exercise. Teams had 18 minutes to create the tallest free-standing structure possible using 1 meter of string, 1 meter of tape, 20 spaghettis, and 1 marshmallow. The marshmallow had to be at the top of the structure. The team that constructed the winning structure, at 20 inches, iterated several times with the placement of the marshmallow instead of waiting until the time was running out.

At the conclusion of the first week of classes, students expressed their excitement for what they had learned. Gilbert Kumusasa, 27, shared, “even at home, everyone has seen the change in the way I think about things. There’s no limit to anything we can do: be it at home, at work, at social settings. We can use this design thinking process to look at problems and come up with innovative solutions.”

After a long week of teaching and learning, the IBD/ACT team got a taste of Zimbabwean culture on our day off. We enjoyed a leisurely meal of sadza (Zimbabwean typical staple food made out of cornmeal) and stews, which are eaten with your hands. Lunch was so delicious and filling that we decided to walk it off at Domboshava, a granite hill just outside of Harare with ancient cave paintings and spectacular balance rocks.

After a whirlwind week of finishing finals, packing up our apartments and saying goodbyes to our friends in Berkeley, our team of five – Elspeth, Mike, Kevin, Gianfranco, and Taylor – headed to Southeast Asia to complete our consulting project for Ananda, a premier real estate developer in Thailand. Ananda, founded by a Haas alum, is one of the largest condominium developers in Bangkok. We were tasked with conducting a competitor analysis and developing a growth strategy plan to help Ananda achieve its aggressive growth targets.

Team Ananda in front of Marina Bay Sands

The Adventure Begins

The team decided to take a detour en route to Bangkok and spent the weekend before our official start date in Singapore, our team lead Elspeth’s home country. Harsh, another classmate and IBD team lead, was also in town and the two of them were incredibly gracious hosts, showing us all of their favorite Singapore hotspots. We explored Orchard Rd, Clarke Quay, Gardens by the Bay, and the beautiful Marina Bay Sands hotel, where we took breathtaking photos of the city. We enjoyed an incredible dinner with Elspeth’s family and a great day at Sentosa, definite highlights of the weekend. The weekend was the perfect start to our Southeast Asian adventure and was a nice mini vacation prior to arriving in Bangkok and hitting the ground running with our client.

Enjoying dinner with the Ong Family.

Ananda Week 1

Our client met us in the lobby of our hotel Monday morning to bring us to the office, which was conveniently located next door; the proximity proved to be a huge blessing as we came to know the huge challenge that is Bangkok traffic. We spent the first week introducing ourselves to key stakeholders within the company and conducting interviews to validate the work we had done in Berkeley. We spoke to employees who had worked at other real estate development companies and pulled on the expertise of strategic business development VPs. We made use of consumer surveys and other market intelligence research the company had conducted and incorporated all of this new information into our analysis.

By the end of the first week, we had validated our competitive analysis processes and reworked some of our strategies based on client feedback. We had spent most of our time with our main point of contact, Khun Lloyd, who was incredibly generous with his time and went out of his way to ensure we had a proper introduction to Bangkok. He kept us busy with lunches and dinners throughout the week, and it quickly became evident how important relationship building is to doing business in Thailand. We had also discovered the magic of Thai massages and began planning our spa visits for the remaining time in country!

After some much-needed massages.

Team Ananda before Day of Arrival Presentation

Angkor Waaaat

After our first week of work, we headed out to Siem Reap, Cambodia! Our trip to the airport was our first real taste of Bangkok traffic and we ended up using multiple modes of transportation, running through the streets and the airport, and convincing an airport employee to help us cut the immigration line in order to make our flight. The crazy travel experience was well worth it and we very much enjoyed our time exploring various temples in Siem Reap and hanging out at our fancy Airbnb, equipped with a pool in the living room. We had a relaxing day on Sunday at Phnom Kulen where we swam and played in waterfalls all day.

Team Ananda in action at Ankor Wat

Week 2

Week two began with a day of site visits to both Ananda and competitor properties. We were impressed by our client’s showrooms and model units, which clearly stood out from their competitors. The attention to detail and beautiful interior design made us all want to invest in Thai property!

The team contemplating purchasing some Thai property

The rest of the week was spent conducting final research and putting the finishing touches on our final presentation deck, which we presented Friday of Week 2 to the CEO and our main points of contact, Dr. John and K. Lloyd. The presentation went well and we had a great discussion about our recommended strategies, learning that many of the workstreams we suggested were already under consideration. Additionally, we discovered our client’s passion for technology. The team is quite visionary and frequents tech hubs such as Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv to scope innovations that could be used to improve their properties and/or work processes.

All smiles after the final presentation

Week 3

Having completed our presentation and main assignment at the end of week two, we spent week three networking and exploring Bangkok. Our client put a strong emphasis on us using our time in country to understand Thai culture and life in Bangkok and encouraged us to use week three to gain this knowledge. We met with another Berkeley alum, K. Paul Ark, who heads up the VC arm of SCB, one of Thailand’s major banks. We connected with a Haas 2015 alum who started his own VC fund and learned more about his post-Haas experience and the work he does in bridging Thailand and San Francisco. We are grateful to have had this free time to further explore Bangkok and to gain a deeper understanding of business in Thailand. We feel spoiled to have been connected with so many interesting people and feel lucky to have spent these three weeks at Ananda. We look forward to staying in touch with our new contacts and will see many of our Ananda contacts in August when they visit the Bay Area!

The IBD Evening Weekend MBA (EWMBA) Teams are on their way to their in-country destinations where they will spend the next two weeks working with their IBD clients before presenting their final recommendations on July 14th. Despite only having a short 6 weeks to prepare, IBD teams are ready to start their time with their clients, face-to-face. Teams are traveling to Harare, Phnom Penh, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo. Are they ready? Faculty Mentor and Instructor, Frank Schultz shares that his students “can’t wait! They have been preparing with such intensity for their in-country time. They have formed very good relationships with their clients via skype, google hangouts, etc, but are anxious to work directly with their clients.”

While the teams have been digging into the scope of the project and learning about their client’s industries, they have also been focusing on team dynamics. ACT Team Lead, Praveen Settipalli is impressed with all that his team has accomplished in a short 6 weeks. “Our team has quickly bonded and formed a trust that has helped us to divide and conquer our workload and be able to deliver what we promised to our client.”

In addition to great team dynamics, the Team Leads must put all of team members’ skills to work. This may be one of the hardest parts of the role, but when it is done right, it is one of the most rewarding. Sushant Barave, the Team Lead for Samai Distillery, has found this part of the journey “personally satisfying”. He has been working with a “great bunch of Hassies” who “in several aspects, are at a higher level of expertise in specific subject matters, than me”. Sushant has looked to his peers to provide a “high level of expertise in specific industries and functions” and he feels that his peers “strengths have created a tremendous learning opportunity for all of us, (that) hopefully set (them) up for delivering a quality product to their client.”

It should be no surprise that the time in-country makes the whole process more productive and manageable. It is difficult trying to communicate via video platforms across time zones, language differences, and cultural nuances. Teams and clients are excited to break down those barriers and dig into their projects face-to-face.

Team Lead, Kalyan Pentapalli, and his team are ready to get to Sao Paulo to work with their client Aramis Menswear. With no retail experience on the team, they have had to get up to speed quickly. This is exactly the experience that they hoped to get by signing up for IBD. “In the past month, I have learned so much about consulting and retail, more than I have learned in the two and a half years of being in the MBA program,” Kalyan shared.

Cambodia’s first rum distillery. Founders Daniel and Antonio grew up in Venezuela, soaking in rum culture and drinking the best rums of the world

Sushant couldn’t agree more with his classmate, Kalyan. “I am super excited about getting to Cambodia. I feel it is all coming together. Over the last 6 weeks, we have already been able to apply several concepts we grasped as part of our coursework at Haas. Part of our project focuses on operations, and I can see our (Berkeley-Haas) Operations Professor talking about inventory management concepts that we are trying to apply. We are also be looking at the quality of financial statements as well as pricing and expansion which bring together the knowledge we have gained at Haas. One of the main reasons I wanted to be a part of IBD was to see how we can apply what we learned in the classroom to the real world. This is where the rubber meets the road. In a couple of days we start to find out what works and what doesn’t in a practical setting. This is the most exciting part. In some ways, most of our work in Berkeley has been on paper and now it’s time to test it. We are going to do that over the next two weeks.“

IBD Team & ACT 2015

This summer, two teams are working with repeat clients, ACT and Samai Distillery, and having the past IBD exposure has helped with efficiently this year. Samai’s Co-Founder, Daniel Pacheco learned a lot from the “previous year where communication was not great before the team arrived. It was hard for us to understand capabilities and expectations and also because things change so fast being a startup. But with this team, we discussed these points from the very beginning and were able to have a more effective approach.” These insights benefited this year’s Samai team and they were able to define a clear scope and identifying which deliverables would be the most useful.

Two weeks can go by very quickly and with so much to accomplish, clients and students are anxious to hit the ground running. Kalyan’s team has already presented their full day agenda and wish list for customer and stakeholder interviews to Aramis. Fabio Davidovici, Aramis’s Strategic Planning Director, is anxious for the team to arrive so they can “have great discussions and clever insights”. Samai’s co-founder’s goals are to get them more familiar with the business, then they will spend time gathering as much data as needed to finalize their deliverables. “We hope these deliverables will not just be a one-off report, but tools that can be used by us to work more efficiently moving forward…it was also very valuable for us to be able to pick the teams brains about areas that might be outside the agreed scope,” shares Daniel Pacheco. ACT’s Team will stay in their client’s home for the two weeks that they are in Harare. Praveen says they are excited to experience the intensity and productiveness of a work and living situation. He also mentioned that his client has a pool and so that makes the six-day work week more appealing.

On the eve of their departure, we are excited to get all of our Berkeley-Haas students safely to their destinations and started on their team and personal IBD journeys. We are confident in their abilities to provide their clients with valuable insights and recommendations. As one of our 2017 Full-Time MBA Team Lead’s shared after returning from her in-country experience, “IBD really is all it’s cracked up to be.” We expect the same reaction from our Evening Weekend MBA teams.

The room was buzzing with three languages, and communication was a game of telephone. One of the Syrian primary students would excitedly share something in Arabic, at which point it was translated into Turkish by a Syrian university student, and then a staff member from Young Guru Academy (YGA) would share it in English with our Berkeley-Haas IBD team of five. Nuance was definitely lost through these piecemeal verbal communications, and we came from radically different backgrounds – lives interrupted by the Syrian Civil War, educations defined by a single test score, and former careers in consulting, software engineering, and clean energy. Yet there was one language in the room that we all understood perfectly – science.

YGA university student volunteers leading a science workshop with Syrian primary school students in Gaziantep. Annie concentrating hard on remembering how electrical circuits work!

Our team, fondly nicknamed “The Turkish Delights,” was at one of YGA’s science workshops with Syrian refugees in Gaziantep – a city in southeast Turkey, just 20 miles from the Syrian border. At first glance, this activity seemed somewhat removed from the formal scope of our project with YGA – developing the strategic business plan for the new Aziz Sancar Science Center, set to open in Istanbul in 2018. We were struggling to understand how participating in YGA’s science workshops in Gaziantep and Trabzon would inform our marketing and financial plans for the Science Center. Coming from high-pressure, deliverable-oriented careers prior to Haas, we all wondered if our time would be better spent at our computers, modeling projected visitor numbers and coming up with creative marketing tactics. The business plan was the whole reason we were here after all, right?

Mariana answering the hardest of science questions, like “Where is Mexico?”

Now in our second week, we have realized the immense gift YGA gave us by immersing us in their culture, projects, and relationships for the first week. Coming into our in-country time with YGA, we knew it would be anything but your typical client-consultant relationship given our interactions from Berkeley, but this experience has exceeded all expectations.

On paper, YGA is a non-profit organization that cultivates “selfless leaders” who will create a brighter future for younger generations through innovative, community-based programs and technologies. These projects include Science and Innovation Workshops, My Dream Companion for the visually-impaired, and the Young Leaders Program for high school students.

When the students insisted on giving us a Turkish dance lesson at the end of one science workshop, we couldn’t say no!

However, the projects themselves are merely tools that YGA uses to instill confidence, humility, and optimism in Turkey’s young generations, with the hope that they will one day lead more socially-conscious organizations and companies. The process of implementing these projects – the planning, the evaluation, the personal growth – is the true goal and measure of success. For example, we ran three separate workshops – one for Syrian refugees, one for orphans, and one for underprivileged students – and although we couldn’t communicate perfectly in any of them, science gave us common ground to which to connect. After each workshop, we paused to reflect on how the students interacted with us and the material, and we all left having learned something about ourselves.

Amol mastering a self-driving car with Syrian students at a science workshop in Gaziantep.

This has been a very new way of thinking and working for us, as we come from jobs where the destination – what you produce – is far more important than the journey. Only by experiencing YGA’s model firsthand could we internalize the notion that success can also be defined as a thoughtful, self-reflective process that leads to personal and collective growth.

Our client Duygu giving us the rundown of all the delicious homemade Turkish dishes!

YGA has made us feel like family, from inviting us to a homemade Turkish dinner at our client’s apartment to including us in their weekly executive leadership meetings.

The future location of the new Aziz Sancar Science Center at Istanbul Technical University’s (İTÜ) Maçka campus, which currently holds very outdated science and technology exhibits.

We have now lived and breathed the YGA way and will deliver a business plan for the Science Center that integrates both the tangible programs and intangible values that define this incredible organization. Earlier this week, when we visited the building in Istanbul where the Aziz Sancar Science Center will open next year, the impact of our project felt more real than ever.

These two weeks have been a blur, and we don’t anticipate it slowing down for the remainder of our time. While we’ve had to squeeze time at our computers into odd hours given the packed, immersive days with YGA, we have still managed to find moments to explore Turkey’s rich cultural – and culinary – offerings! We spent a few hours touring Trabzon with a very jolly tour guide who shared all of the local jokes and stuffed ourselves with Gaziantep’s world famous katmer!

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We have also been befriending Istanbul’s well-cared-for stray cats and popping into the city’s gorgeous mosques at every chance.

The full depth of the IBD experience likely won’t hit home until we are on our return flights or starting our summer internships because it is so much to digest both personally and professionally. We all know, however, that YGA has forever changed how we define success.

Written by: Danner Doud-Martin, Assistant Director, Operations for the IBD Program

When I introduced myself to the Full-Time MBAs on their first day of class for the Spring IBD program, I told them I wanted to either be the sixth member of their team or be stowed in their suitcases. There wasn’t a team I didn’t want to join as all 16 were going to work with great clients, on impactful projects, and in amazing destinations. Now that our IBD students are scattered all over the world and sending photos and updates from their first weeks in-country, I am of course envious, but also proud to be a part of a program like IBD. I am living vicariously through our Haas students as they have experiences that perhaps will change their lives, or at least make these next three weeks incredibly exciting.

Team YGA having breakfast on Bosphorus river

Teams tell us that they have been welcomed by their clients and the other members of the organizations with warmth, appreciation, and support. They have enjoyed delicious local cuisine, been invited to people’s homes and seen the local sites. They have toured crane factories, hospitals, warehouses, and flower markets. Teams have scrubbed up and witnessed eye surgeries in Peru, been included in their client’s internal pitch meetings in Shanghai, and invited to lunch by the Prime Minister of Uganda. They have been featured on local Turkish television and have conducted 3-hour design workshops for university students in Uganda.

Team Seva before going into to witness a surgery in Peru

Importantly, they have learned more about their client’s needs: “One interesting thing that we have realised in our first 2 days is how much more we know of the business and the internal politics behind our client by just being here; which is something not very clear when you are sitting that far away,” shared one Team Lead. There is an opportunity now to “fill in our gaps in knowledge through the interviews, market visits, and retail store visits we have scheduled over the next several weeks. We look forward to the rest of the trip!” shared the Agripacific Team. IBD Teams also feel more connection to the client’s objective and how important the project outcome is to their client. “It is most exciting to be on the ground here and feel the immensity and importance of the work that our client does,” shared Blakey Larson, IBD Team Lead for Civil Right Defenders. IBD teams also see where and how they can add value. Team Lead, Harsh Thusu said of his project, “we are most excited about helping the accelerator in this interesting journey as they are at a crucial stage of their operations and our recommendations could bring great value to them to tap into the US market with a sustainable business model.”

Team ElectroMech

On their first day in-country, IBD Teams gave a day-of-arrival presentation, updating their clients on their findings to date and outlining their 3-week work plan leading up to their final presentations. Teams felt good about their presentations and expressed how “engaged their clients were.” They appreciated the collaboration, feedback, and lively discussions. Carolyn Chuong, Team Lead for Team Makerere said that their clients were “very enthusiastic and also helped us refine our Theory of Change for the Center and think through private sector needs.”

“This team is exceptional. They are very innovative, articulate, friendly and professional. The team has the right blend of skills because everyone is so good at what he or she does while at the same time, everyone is working as a team. The testimony from our Makerere students, who attended today’s design workshop led by the IBD Team, were so amusing. I like the natural blend they are having with our students, staff and the general population of Makerere. We shall surely miss our Haas students when they leave”.

YGA’s Sezin AYDIN said of Team Lead Chelsea Harris’s performance at their press conference, “Chelsea has done a great job, you

Team Ananda

can see how clearly she conveyed her messages, in a calm yet positively energizing way. We are very happy that we had a chance to offer this kind of experience to our team and very glad that we represented YGA & Berkeley and the mission we serve together in science center project the most beautiful way possible”.

My favorite compliment was from Makerere’s Charles Baguma who said, “I think we got a high-flying team from Berkeley”. In my opinion, Mr. Baguma’s comment resonates with me because Team Makerere and all of the other 15 Full-Time IBD teams are exceptional. Based on their photos and comments, all the teams feel they are flying high right now. Is it because of the incredible opportunity to work internationally on a consulting project? Is it because of the impact that our students are making on the company and the region or the bonds that are being formed between team members as they share this incredible journey? Is it the beautiful places they are visiting and the culture that they are experiencing? It is all of the above and more!

You can enjoy their adventures by friending us on Facebook at bit.ly/facebookibd. Each week we will post a blog written by each IBD team highlighting their experiences, and our first one written by Team Makerere can be found here. You can also subscribe to our blog by going to bit.ly/ibdblog.

While the Full-Time MBA (FTMBA) program is at the end of their engagement with IBD, 18 Evening and Weekend MBA (EWMBA) students kicked off their IBD experience on May 14th. This is the 6th year that the course has been offered to EWMBA students and although the program is very similar to the FTMBA course, there is one significant difference: time. The summer program has much less of it overall, as students only have seven weeks of instruction and two weeks in-country working with clients. EWMBA Teams are also made up of 4-5 students and led by a Team Lead, who is a classmate but unlike the FTMBA Program, the EWMBA Team Leads don’t have the additional weeks to work with their client to build rapport and gather intel on their project before their Team Members join the project. Instead, they have to jump right into the process and establish themselves as a lead of their project to their client and teammates. When asked about his strategy for being a Team Lead at this point in the process, the Samai Distillery Team Lead, Sushant Barave said:

Team Aramis

“Although we are at a very early stage, I am realizing how amazingly competent our team is. In a way, this makes my job as a team lead quite easy! I hate to call it a ‘strategy’ because it really boils down to keeping things really simple at this stage – having open communication, a structured approach to understand and address client’s needs, and making sure that all of us are having fun in the process!”

This is a sentiment we hear often from Team Leads in both the FTMBA and EWMBA programs. The Aramis Menswear Team Lead, Kalyan Pentapalli shared, “I have a very experienced team and sometimes it feels intimidating leading three third year students, but they have been gracious enough to let me set an example and lead.”

Lead, motivate, organize, delegate, and manage work streams is what our EWMBA Team Leads will do as they prepare to go in-country on July 1st. It’s a quick turn-around and with full-time jobs and other obligations, it is a lot to manage. “It has already been great working with the team, and we are getting familiar with each other’s working styles. Given our crazy schedules collectively as a group, we have also been open to calls ranging from 7 am to 11 pm – this goes to show the flexibility and commitment from the team members”, shares Barun Mazumdar, a member of the Aramis Team.

Many students come to Haas because of the opportunity IBD gives them. The Team Lead for ACT, Praveen Settipalli, was determined to take IBD before he graduated despite having a new baby and starting work at a startup. He heard first-hand experiences about IBD from his classmates and he, like so many others, felt he could benefit from the opportunity to work on an international consulting project. “As a product manager, IBD will help me renew my core-consulting skills of framing the problem, lead a diverse team to formulate the strategy and obtain resources for successful execution. Doing this in a different industry/culture with a team of amazing Haas MBAs will also teach me how to lead across diverse environments. Personally, the IBD structure would allow me to embrace uncertainty and openness and immerse myself in a new environment. I also hope to reflect on my current environment and leadership style while at the client location and come back not just with awesome solutions for the client but also unforgettable memories and experiences.”

Team Samai

Frank Schultz, the Instructor and Faculty Mentor for the EWMBA program is confident that his students will be able to balance all of their competing priorities to find personal and professional successes from their IBD experience. “I have been teaching the EWMBA IBD program since inception and every year I appreciate how much my teams dedicate themselves to their client and projects to provide true ROI – despite their day jobs and their families. I have no doubt that this year’s students will work very hard and like every year, they will enjoy getting a taste of consulting in a global setting. They will undoubtedly come back from their two weeks in-country with new perspectives, tools, and confidence to try different approaches.”

Teams will travel all over the world this July. Praveen’s team will work with a social enterprise that provides entrepreneurship training and mentorship to young Zimbabweans and Sushant is taking his team to Cambodia to work with a rum distillery start-up. We have one team that will travel to Mexico to work with a consumer and corporate financial services company, and Kalyan’s team will work with a privately held 20-year old menswear retailer in Brazil. We are confident that these EWMBA students will have unforgettable and invaluable experiences.

“IBD was the best experience I had at Haas.” One of the reasons we repeatedly hear this sentiment from our Berkeley-Haas alumni is because of the client/student project dynamic. The IBD experience goes beyond the classroom and intersects with real life. For 24 years IBD clients have looked to the MBA’s in our IBD program to solve concrete challenges for their organizations. They have invested their time, resources and trust in our IBD consulting teams.

One of our exceptional spring 2017 IBD client organizations is known as Young Guru Academy or YGA. YGA is a non-profit organization founded in Turkey in 2000 with the mission of cultivating selfless leaders to realize the dream of a brighter future for younger generations.YGAstudents volunteer over 3,000 hours of their time working in teams on social innovation projects. The organization focuses on three fields of innovation – science, orphans, and the visually impaired – and develops innovations that impact the lives of many in these areas.

We asked Sezin Aydin, YGA’s Director of International Affairs, to answer some questions about YGA and the IBD experience to date.

IBD: What made you decide to participate in the IBD program?

YGA: Over the years, we have experienced that the essence of a fruitful partnership is one of shared values and meaning. Once we saw that (Berkeley-Haas and YGA) both value field study and we both find the development of a student imagining a better world to be meaningful, our passion in participating in the IBD program grew.

IBD: What do you hope to accomplish from your IBD experience?

YGA: The field we chose to collaborate with IBD Students is YGA’s project on the advancement of science among youth. The IBD team is specifically working on developing sustainable marketing and financial strategy for all three parts of the science project- the launch of a Science Museum to inspire youth and adults with attractive, inspiring and thought-provoking content, production of a Live Science Show, which will be broadcasted on CNNTurk; and the distribution of Science Kits which has been designed by YGA graduates and funded through crowdsourcing.

What strongly unites the IBD team and YGA in this project is the shared dream of children becoming more curious and enthusiastic about science. YGA brings years of experience of working with students from age 10 to 22, visually impaired students, orphans and recently, refugees, as well as knowledge of local opportunities, obstacles, and challenges. The IBD students, on the other hand, bring a global perspective as each team member comes from a different background and knowledge of best management practices.

IBD: How has the IBD experience been to date?

YGA Visits Berkeley-Haas

YGA: It has already been an amazing experience. Even before YGA was selected to participate in IBD program, we always felt we are on the same team.We are aware of the approach most international universities adopt for programs in Turkey nowadays. There are not enough words to explain our gratitude to Prof. Kristiana Raube for the support she has provided to YGA. We very much appreciate her confidence in us, and we will strive to make this meaningful collaboration work in the best way possible.

IBD: Have you enjoyed working with your Team Lead, Faculty Mentor, and newly formed Team Members?

YGA: Prof. Kristi said in our last meeting, “We feel like we are old friends now.” This is exactly how we feel about each other. Team Lead Chelsea Harris and Prof. Kristiana Raube devote many hours each week and have brought valuable resources to the YGA Science Project. Our team members, Amol Borcar, Mariana Martinez-Alarcon, Annie Porter and Jeanne Godleski, have impressive backgrounds from diverse fields. Their combined strength is a valuable resource for this project.

Berkeley’s culture is very close to YGA’s culture. We believe in the essence of Berkeley Culture’s 4 pillars, just, we have them in different words. We believe in questioning the status quo: we say “Positive Challenge” to do things in a better way. We believe in confidence without attitude: we say “Selfless Confidence.” We believe in the unlimited potential we possess: we say “Best Today, Better Tomorrow.” And we always believe in students: we say “Our main project is people project.”

IBD: Are you excited for any part of the process that is coming in the future?

YGA: Next week, our team will present a benchmark analysis of world-class science museums, their key performance indicators (KPIs) and examples of some of the best practices. The most exciting part will be their final presentation which they will be delivering to a very high executive level audience- the advisory board of the Science Museum. As challenging as it may be, we have no doubt it will also be a broad experience for them.

IBD: What are you most excited to share with your team when they arrive in Istanbul?

YGA: Most importantly, we would like to share the YGA culture. We already consider them YGA students, like ourselves. We would like to share our challenges and what we have learned from them. A special trip to Trabzon-Tonya, a north city by the Black Sea, is planned which includes science workshops with primary school students.

There will be two notable events which will take place during our teams’ in-country visit: Great Place to Work Awards Ceremony – in which YGA will be awarded a Great Place to Work in Turkey for the second time; and the YGA Annual Advisory Board Dinner in which YGA will announce its new entrepreneurship model.

Finally, İstanbul is one of the most glamourous cities in the world. We will enjoy the most beautiful views of this city throughout the program. Of course, Turkish cuisine is an inseparable part of the program, so we advise our team to start exercising in advance to make room for delicious food!The IBD Team leaves for Istanbul on May 13th to experience all that YGA has planned for them during their three weeks in-country. We look forward to hearing from the IBD Team about their experience. Please check back over the summer as we will feature blogs written by our student teams. We leave you with the last thought from Chelsea Harris, the IBD Team Lead, about how she feels about the partnership with YGA.